Insomnia: Army Stories

A retired General is haunted by voices of dead men.Soldiers from two enemy nations manning posts in freezing Siachen form a strange connection.A young Lieutenant dying in the jungles of Arunachal is watched over by three men one of whom would have his destiny changed forever.What is the dark secret held by a Major and his men operating incognito in Kashmir? What surprise is a train bound for Agra bringing to the all-male bastion of 13 Para? Who are the invisible people a little girl awaiting brain surgery in the Lansdowne Military Hospital talks to?From the bestselling author of The Brave 1965 and Kargil comes a book that will take you into the olive-green world of army cantonments through stories that will delight and disturb in equal measure. Review Rachna Bisht Rawat's 'Insomnia' is an engaging collection of tales about the Indian ArmyStop him' she said hoarsely. 'I have seen those shoes before.'The lines end the chilling Home Alone a story in Rachna Bisht Rawat's latest book Insomnia. It places the revered bond of an Army officer his family and his buddy (referred to as batman sahayak or Man Friday over the years) under a different spotlight one that is often hidden behind the hedgerows that line the prim and proper world of cantonments.With tales such as these Rawat steps away from her four previous books on the Indian Army that celebrate the soldier's derring-do in the nation's many wars. She instead turns the focus on human emotions - love compassion camaraderie horror and trauma - that pepper the life of men and women in uniform and lifts the veil on their little-known personal lives.Rawat a former journalist Harry Brittain fellow and winner of the Commonwealth Press Quarterly's Rolls Royce Award wrote many of these stories when she was a young Army wife living in the sleepy border town of Ferozepur a decade ago. These stories came much before my published books says Rawat over phone from Delhi. I wrote sitting in my garden near a bamboo thicket the strains of the Gurbani wafting over the mustard fields. This year during lockdown with only Hukum my golden retriever for company I wrote a few more. They helped me get over the sadness I encountered when interviewing families for my previous book Kargil.Rawat comes from sturdy Army stock. Daughter sister and wife of Army officers she has had men in olive-green around for a lifetime walking all over my carpet and my heart with their dirty DMS boots driving me insane with their unpredictable lives and melting me completely with a salute and a smile.The real pictureBut in the 17 stories in Insomnia (published by Penguin) Rawat portrays an emotive picture of the lives of soldiers their families and their brotherhood - stories which only could be written by someone closely related to the Army says former Chief of Army Staff General VP Malik in the book.Rawat however says that in writing about what war poet Wilfred Owen calls the pity of war she has laid bare hidden facets of Army life.Life in cantonments remains unchanged. Time stops here the ethos is the same so my stories written then will resonate even now. Although fictionalised some of the stories are loosely based on real events. In writing about PTSD murder human rights violations and the horrors of war I have not won brownie points with some in the Army fraternity. For my previous books I had to get requisite permissions. This book I wrote with my hands untied.The stories are vintage Rawat. Sprinkled with equal measures of hope and horror her lucid prose tells it as it is. But to get to this reality a different register is used. There are heroes in ferocious combat assaults fighting the enemy while also fighting for the version of the truth that will be in the official records a retired general who is haunted by voices of dead men the emotional connection of enemy soldiers in freezing Siachen the dark secret of a Major opera